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Sunday, April 27, 2014

Since we're calling out cool cider events, let me offer a hearty Txotx! A week from today, on May 4, Bar Vivant on East Burnside is hosting an authentic, honest-to-goodness txotx feast. In the Spanish Basque country, Txotx (pronounced "choach" and rhymes with coach) is the celebratory feast that accompanies the ripening of local cider. I had the great pleasure to visit Gipuzkoa in January and wrote about Txotx here. For one day only, you'll get to sample the feast here in PDX:

Here's the menu, which is spot-on what you'd find in a cider house in Astigarraga.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

It is one of my (now not so) secret desires to write a book about traditional beers and fruit wines. They are cultural sturgeon--artifacts from a far, far earlier age. Whether it's ancient African or Peruvian beer or Indian palm wine, sitting down with a glass is a ritual you can imagine ancestors doing 100 years ago. Add tepache to the list. Until Nat West told me about a batch he made last year, I'd never even heard of it, and am still 99% ignorant. Fortunately, in these modern times, we have the Google.

This hard-to-find drink called tepache — pronounced "tay-PAH-chay" —
is a lightly fermented cider typically made from pineapple and seasoned
with spices such as allspice, cinnamon and clove. An unrefined brown
sugar called piloncillo is added for sweetness and depth. It is not
uncommon for oranges, apples, tamarind or other fruits to find their way
into the mix.

Traditional versions found in Mexico usually
demand that it be made in a seasoned wooden barrel called a tepachera,
but because of the lower cost and ease, most tepache made in Chicago is
fermented in glass or plastic jars. After one to five days of
fermentation, tepache takes on a slightly acidic effervescence and a
surprisingly pleasant funk, characteristics also found in other styles
of fruit ciders. If tepache is left to ferment for much longer, a sharp
vinegar flavor starts to creep in. Home-brewers often reinforce their
own renditions with beer.

It is invariably described as lightly alcoholic, which given the brix of pineapple, seems odd. (The spiky fruit contains about as much sugar as an apple and therefore, fermented, should be 6% or so.) But there's also this fascinating fragment from the dictionary: "an intoxicating beverage made from pulque and coarse sugar with timbe used to retard fermentation." That's inaccurate, apparently (pulque is a different ancient fermented beverage), but this thing called timbe is an interesting clue: "the bark or root of any of several Mexican trees and shrubs (esp. Acacia angustissima and Calliandra anomala) used in the manufacture of tepache."

Well, Portlanders will have a chance to look more deeply into the phenomenon on Cinco de Mayo as Nat releases this year's batch.

Tepache is a traditional Mexican drink, frequently consumed out of a
plastic baggie with a straw, sold by street vendors in Jalisco and made
at home. We make our ¡Tepache! with fresh Costa Rican pineapples, pure
Michoacan piloncillo (raw unrefined sugar) and a blend of three spices –
No Apples! The fermentation happens on the scales and rind of the
pineapples, imparting a deep and unique flavor.

Details about the event and tickets are here, and if you see Nat, you can ask him how it's made.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

The Brewers Association has new style guidelines out, and in a couple weeks, I will return to them for some more meaty analysis. For the moment, have a look for yourself (.pdf). There are some significant changes to the methodology to go along with the usual adjustments and additions.

There are now more "American-style" beers listed than beers from any other national origin.

There are 35 subtypes listed under the catch-all "hybrid" category, more than lager subtypes (30)

Bamberg gets a lot of love: four subtypes reference the city. (No other city, including Munich, is listed more than twice)

The last thing I'll leave you with is this statement in the preamble to the rules. It is, more than anything else, a distillation of the American view of brewing. I have no problem with that as far as it goes--each country has very different brewing philosophies--but because the GABF and World Beer Cup are so influential, I do despair that this view should infect the thinking beyond our shores.

Each style description is purposefully written independently of any reference to another beer style. Furthermore, as much as it is possible, beer character is not described in terms of ingredients or process. These guidelines attempt to emphasize final evaluation of the product and try not to judge or regulate the formulation or manner in which it was brewed, except in special circumstances that clearly define a style.

Monday, April 21, 2014

I see that I last posted on Wednesday, and a lame filler post at that. Well, guess what? More filler! An article making the rounds today comes from the Chicago Tribune, recounting the grim beer scene in Germany. I've been reading these articles for years, and to be fair, they reflect the mood of breweries in the grand old bierland.

Yet for many German brewers, the good times are over. A slump in
consumption of more than a third in the last 25 years has hit Germany,
Europe's biggest beer producer, triggering intense competition and price
discounting. With young Germans turning to spirits and non-alcoholic fruit drinks, beer sales fell 2 percent last year alone.
Traditional family breweries, also under pressure from double-digit
rises in energy, glass and malt costs, are struggling, some dying.

I'd like to add a Very Big Caveat here for all to consider: compared to what? In the United States, where beer geeks have declared undiluted cultural victory over the vanquished mass market lagers, something like 90% of the beer is still mass market lagers. In the US, beer consumption continues to dwindle, too, and wine and liquor consumption are on the rise. Belgium, where local breweries are even more morose than Germans, has one of the most robust ale markets in the world--far stronger than anything in the UK or US. (If I weren't doing a filler post here, I'd check on Ireland.) At my last check, ales had about 11% of the market in Britain, but 30% in Belgium.

So yes, things used to be better in these countries, and if you were watching production slip every year, you'd be anxious and morose, too. But German and Belgium (and the Czech Republic) are the world's greatest beer success stories, where local styles have managed to weather the onslaught of mass market light lagers. And things change. The trend is down now, but that doesn't mean it always will be. The craft renaissance may well come to those countries, and it may have unpredictable and yet still wonderful effects.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Two dudes wander around Newcastle drinking in various pubs. If you miss ambling around the streets of chill cities where the rain rattles down spitefully and then ducking into warm pubs with cask ale, this will please you.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Someone from Eugene's Bier Stein pointed me (via Twitter) to this article by Saul Austerlitz in the Times magazine. It discusses the rise of "poptimism," the backlash among music critics against those who have long lauded mainly old, white dudes.

The reigning style of music criticism today is called “poptimism,” or
“popism,” and it comes complete with a series of trap doors through
which the unsuspecting skeptic may tumble. Prefer Queens of the Stone
Age to Rihanna? Perhaps you are a “rockist,” still salivating over your
old Led Zeppelin records and insisting that no musical performer not
equipped with a serious case of self-seriousness and, probably, a
guitar, bass and drums is worthy of consideration. Find Lady Gaga’s
bargain basement David Bowie routine a snooze? You, my friend, are
fatally out of touch with the mainstream, with the pop idols of the
present.

Poptimism wants to be in touch with the taste of average music fans, to speak to the rush that comes from hearing a great single on the radio, or YouTube, and to value it no differently from a song with more “serious” artistic intent.

Okay, so far so obvious. But then he asks--and this is where the tweet came from: "I like to entertain myself by imagining what might happen if the
equivalent of poptimism were to transform those other disciplines." He imagines the worlds of literature and film under such a backlash (which makes me wonder where he's been--this backlash is very much active in these other disciplines). Indeed, it's a flavor of meditation that we have been happening since at least the 1960s when pop art challenged the mores of art. (I mean, it's right there in the title. How is "poptimism" anything remotely new?)

But now we come at last to the point of this post: in beer, what is haute? You can't have a backlash without a lash, and I'm not sure we can make the case for one. Certain beer styles are very popular with a niche group (barrel-aged beers, strong hoppy beers, sour beers), but there's no ruling beer orthodoxy. The sourheads, to take one example, aren't zymurgical royalty; they are, to use the music analogy, like metalheads. Many people want to declare a high and low among beer styles, but no one has come close to enforcing it. Even a group like CAMRA, set up to expressly to do this, now finds itself defending beer that many craft beer fans consider old and lame.

(Parenthetical semi-digression. The whole notion of orthodoxy probably died around the turn of the century, or perhaps a few years later when Facebook and Twitter arrived. We're no longer really aware of worlds we choose not to inhabit. Without a collective dataset that includes both high and low, the critical framework collapses in on itself. I listen to certain types of music, watch certain kinds of movies, read certain kinds of books, and drink certain kinds of beers. But only in rare cases do I actually find myself discussing these critically with anyone else; they all have their own, different groups of movies, books, and music. Everyone sees the Avengers and we all judge it like it's sui generis, or possibly in comparison with a set of very similar movies. No one thinks to mention Fellini.)

So unless someone can make a very effective argument that there's a high culture in beer, I don't think we're really ready for our pop art correction.

Monday, April 14, 2014

On Saturday, I pried myself away from the computer to head down the gorge for the first annual Hard Pressed Cider Fest just outside Hood River. The location was a fruit warehouse in the middle of acres and acres of rolling orchards in bloom. I'm still in super slo-mo on blogging as I enter the final two weeks of book-writing (about cider, so I justified the trip as "research"), so you just get pictures.

Hood-san rises above the flowery scene.

A nice western swing/country band serenaded fest-goers. (Cider is more country than beer.)

Friday, April 11, 2014

A Portland landmark is celebrating 40 years. In 1974, Richard Nixon told the country "I've never been a quitter" on national TV as he fled the White House. As if re-balancing the scales of wholesomeness, Old Town Pizza opened that same year in Portland. It has been through a lot in those four decades--haven't we all?--but is now a vibrant new pizzeria and brewpub. Last week, owner Adam Milne invited me to check out their modern NE Portland outpost. That's where they do the brewing under the oversight of one of my favorite brewers, Bolt Minister, and also where I got to meet Madi the Piemaster.

This is a placeholder post until I can give you the full story. Old Town is celebrating their major milestone now, so go celebrate with them. The old site remains one of the more interesting places in the city (even without considering Nina, the resident ghost), and if you haven't been to the pub out on MLK, it's really worth a visit. More in a few weeks' time, but for now--cheers to Old Town.

Wednesday, April 09, 2014

If I weren't being willfully perverse, I'd tell you to go to Coalition for the barrel-aged barley wine they're currently pouring. It is a decadent treat, one that even I--a drinker suspicious of bourbon-aged beers in general and barley wines in particular--loved. It is rich and intense but balanced (if chocolate mousse is your idea of balance), exactly the kind of beer most beer geeks seek out. But I am willfully perverse, and this sherpa therefore eschews the obvious soaring peaks and guides you to the verdant valleys instead. To where the wheat grows.

Coalition's Wheat the People is that lush valley. There is absolutely nothing flashy about this beer. It's a simple American wheat, with gentle aromatics, a soft body, and some stone-fruit esters that inflect the very light, grassy hopping. It's the kind of beer that presents itself, wholly and fully, on the first sip and does not evolve or change with a pint, or two, or three. If your attention wanders to conversation, when you return it to your beer, you will find all the pleasures you left there a half hour earlier. It rewards attention but does not demand it.

It's a timely beer because it illustrates the point about appreciating simplicity. And, on a warm day like the ones we're enjoying now, a body pines for something less dense. Wheat the People is perfect sunshine beer. If you drop by the brewery, you probably ought to try the barley wine, too, but don't overlook this simple pleasure.

_______________________"Beer Sherpa Recommends" is an irregular feature. In this fallen world, when the number
of beers outnumber your woeful stomach capacity by several orders of
magnitude, you risk exposing yourself to substandard beer. Worse, you
risk selecting substandard beer when there are tasty alternatives at
hand. In this terrible jungle of overabundance, wouldn't it be nice to
have a neon sign pointing to the few beers among the crowd that really
stand out? A beer sherpa, if you will, to guide you to the beery
mountaintop. I don't profess to drink all the beers out there, but from
time to time I stumble across a winner and when I do, I'll pass it
along to you.

Saturday, April 05, 2014

File this under "hmmm." When I traveled to England, France, and Spain in January to do cider research, I was amazed at how consistent the weather was. I'd pull up my weather app, which was set to Portland, OR, and it would say 42 degrees Fahrenheit and rainy. Then I'd swipe over to Bristol (which is a decent midpoint between Hereford and Somerset), and it would say 42 and rainy. Then to Lisieux and it would say ... 42 and rainy. As I write this, it's 53 in Portland, 56 in Bristol, and 57 in Lisieux. (All cloudy, natch.) It got me thinking about climate and whether there was something to wet, temperate places that make for good apples.

In the book I'm working on, I have used a narrative model to describe cider, focusing in on traditional cider makers from various places in Europe and the US. In the charts below, you can see how they stack up in terms of temperature and rainfall. I selected the places based on the cideries I covered in my book, throwing in Fennville, Michigan as a final entrant, even though I didn't visit Virtue Cider. It's on the coast of Lake Michigan. (I did speak with Greg Hall and the cidery is mentioned in the book.) You could add a lot more lines to the chart--Oviedo, Asturias, Yakima, Virginia--but this seems to illustrate things well enough.

Let's look first at average high temperatures, which are relevant during the growing season. At the height of the growing season, there's a ten-degree difference between England (72) and all the US locations, which interestingly have average highs of 82. That's the widest gap. Spring temps are warmer in Spain, but similar in the other locations.

I was especially interested in the lows, because in traditional cider-making, the juice is fermented naturally. Temperatures that are too low would halt that process without intervention, while high temperatures would put the ferment at risk. (All the Europeans do natural fermentation, as do EZ Orchards in Salem, Virtue in Fennville, and although Farnum Hill pitches yeast, they don't have much temperature control.) Michigan and New Hampshire are real outliers here, but Oregon and the European countries stay largely within a few degrees of one another.

Finally, rainfalls are pretty similar, too, except for insanely wet San Sebastian in the Basque Country, which is a wetter city than New Orleans. The rainfall patterns are different: Oregon's dry in the summer, Bristol in the Spring, and Lisieux in the winter. San Sebastian is never dry, and New Hampshire and Michigan get fairly even precipitation throughout the year.

It's not easy to draw big conclusions, but I pass it along for your edification nevertheless.

Wednesday, April 02, 2014

Thirty years ago today, brothers Kurt and Rob Widmer officially launched their eponymous brewery. (They didn't have an actual brewery or beer yet, but they mark the anniversary to the moment they started building all that.) Five years ago, I did a retrospective that covers the arc of their historyand includes a few photos of that haute 80s fashion. For this anniversary, they've gone back to the brewing logs and plan to release thirty beers from the archives. The first three are their first three beers--Altbier, Weizen, and Hefeweizen. You can see the brewery they thought they'd be when you glance at the early beers, which in addition to the first three include Festbier, Maerzen, Bockbier, Oktoberfest, and Ray's Amber Lager, Doppelbock, and Ur-Alt. I doubt very seriously that they looked into the 21st century and saw a rotating IPA series in their future.

Raise a pint to the venerable old brewery. (Well, venerable by American standards). Prost!

Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Since its founding, the Brewers Association has maintained an occasionally-revised definition of what a craft brewery is, and they've also run a campaign targeting "crafty" beers--but this is the first time they've dared to actually define "craft beer." Have a look.

American craft beer is disruptive, impactful, and made by the right people.

Disruptive: Like all revolutionary technologies, craft beer disrupts the dominant paradigm. Craft beer disrupts the old definitions of beer and brewing. It disrupts a drinker's expectations. It disrupts the marketplace with innovation and originality. After three imperial IPAs, it even disrupts a person's ability to find his car.

Brewed by the "right" people: Craft beer is brewed by the guy down the block. Or possibly contract brewed by the guy down the block. Or possibly by 243 guys on the other side of the country. It might be brewed in a series of large industrial breweries as well, just not breweries that are too large. It is neverbrewed by large Belgian-owned brewing conglomerates, but middle-sized Belgian brewing conglomerates are a-okay. (Middle-sized Costa Rican conglomerates are not a-okay.) Actually, we'll tell you who the right people are. We keep a list.

I will say this: it's honest. I'm not sure it will be a PR coup, but you never know. I thought that "crafty" campaign was going to backfire, too.